Here in the states, many of us are looking at another round of lockdowns, which means construction companies might once again need to keep many workers remote. Did it work last time? Here is the scary reality: 66% of remote workers have encountered an IT issue during the lockdown. Of that, 57.5% did not share their issue with the IT team.
In September, NetMotion asked a series of questions to IT professionals. The survey found that roughly one in six organizations are not monitoring the remote worker experience at all. The research also discovered that even among the 82% of businesses monitoring remote employees to some extent, IT could not diagnose the root cause of a technical remote work issue 27% of the time.
Enter experience monitoring—which is the process of gathering performance and activity data from devices that employees use to work from, and the networks they connect to and the applications and services being used to help IT understand the experience from the user’s perspective. These tools typically employ an agent on the device to gather a wide variety of information. Leveraging these data points directly from the endpoint makes it possible to evaluate potential stability and performance issues in realtime.
Experience monitoring gives IT teams the ability to actively monitor and troubleshoot a host of metrics related to device, application, and network performance. These can include: device activity, mobile data usage, application and website usage, data destinations, productivity and adoption rates, network performance and diagnostics, Wi-Fi security information, application performance, device performance, web activity, and data consumption.
The concept was first published by Gartner back in 2019, and was followed up in a report in August of 2020, which outlines three core types of solutions, including:
- Realtime user monitoring: Evaluates the user experience from the perspective of the application, such as a website or mobile app
- Endpoint monitoring: Provides visibility into end-user devices
- Synthetic transaction monitoring: Focuses on the performance and uptime of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and other services
And like all new concepts, there is some discrepancy among the analysts on what exactly this should be called. While NetMotion simply calls it experience monitoring and Gartner uses the term DEM (digital experience monitoring), Forrester prefers EUEM (end-user experience management), and categories it into pure-play tools, endpoint management specialists, and monitoring solutions. Perhaps we should all agree on one name, but either way it has the potential to offer real value to IT, especially in a remote world.
While this concept existed before the pandemic, it no doubt has been accelerated due to it—much like other technologies. Traditional monitoring tools became less effective at determining and troubleshooting issues nearly overnight.
In a recent conversation with Yanick Pouffary, chief technologist for IoT and edge services, HPE Pointnext Services, I had the opportunity to uncover many of the challenges today’s companies are facing with remote work, why it is important to put employees at the center of the transformation, and the importance of augmentation, remote operation, and flexible automation.
As she explains to me, “What this pandemic has done is created a change—a major reset in our industry—the time before this pandemic will never come back and we all need to understand this, we just need to ensure we have the right technology to accelerate the value we can deliver.”
She points to five distinct capabilities for returning to work including: social distance tracing and tracking, touchless entry, fever detection, augmented reality and visual remote guidance, and workplace alerts and information sharing.
Experience monitoring tools are also helpful, due to being able to monitor and improve the remote working experience. IT teams can react to tickets and understand and resolve issues. They can also improve the employee experience. The result will be increased productivity of remote workers, faster speed of remediation, overall morale and satisfaction improvements, and improved engagement with digital transformation projects—and isn’t that all what we need right now?
Want to tweet about this article? Use hashtags #construction #IoT #sustainability #AI #5G #cloud #edge #futureofwork #infrastructure #digitaltransformation